Obama recently presented his 2010 budget, and a lot of Americans are having sticker shock. From an economic standpoint, his budget does have a couple good ideas in it, such as cutting some subsidies to farmers. But after that, it gets a little scary.

This budget provides the clearest picture yet of what Obama really wants to do: expand government and redistribute wealth. Even the New York Times calls the budget a “pronounced move to redistribute wealth”.

How so? Well consider how he plans to (partially) fund all the new endeavors. He wants to raise taxes on the wealthy (which some economists are predicting will have to soon mean anyone making over $75,000), eliminate tax breaks for businesses (those places that provide jobs), and cut defense spending.

Not only do higher taxes on businesses mean they can hire less people, but higher taxes on people reduces their incentive to work. This leads us to the question: what is the best way to help the poor - those with low-paying jobs or no job at all? There's two main ways: A) increase the wealth of everyone in the country or B) redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. Studies by economists show that option A almost always proves to help the poor the most.

With Obama's plan of redistribution, there may be more equality, but that will likely come at the expense of having a worse economy for years to come. That means earning less money, having worse investment opportunities, and seeing more people without jobs.

But didn't Obama say he'd cut our deficit in half by 2013? Yes, and that's great in theory... smaller deficits are always better. But just so there's no confusion here: that's cutting the annual deficit in half, not our total deficit. This would be like a friend telling you, "Hey, great news. I know I just borrowed a bunch of money from you that I have no idea how I'll pay it back, but I'll only be borrowing half of that each year from now on."

With having a deficit every year for the next 10 years, Obama projects that our total deficit would go from $8.3 trillion this year to $15.3 trillion by 2019. That means the average debt per person would go from $25,000 to $46,000. Oh, and those numbers are based on what many people think are overly optimistic projections for economic growth. It will likely be worse than that... if the budget passes, that is.

What's the silver lining in this? It should wake our country up and make us realize we need true fiscal conservatives. We know we can't keep spending more than we have. It will have the American people looking to Republicans once again. That, of course, means Republicans better be ready.